Morocco’s avid bookseller
- Mohamed Aziz, described as Morocco’s oldest bookseller, has read over 4,000 books despite leaving school early. (x.com) - Social posts celebrate his decades of reading and a trusting approach to customers at his lifelong stall. (x.com) - The story surfaced as World Book Day conversations highlighted personal reading histories and community booksellers. (x.com)
In Rabat’s old medina, bookseller Mohamed Aziz has become the face of a story circulating online this week: a man who left school at 15 but kept reading for decades. (news18.com) Aziz was born in 1948, lost his parents at age 6, and said he had to abandon school because he could not afford textbooks. He started selling books in 1963 with nine volumes laid out on a rug under a tree. (wikipedia.org) By 1967, he had opened a permanent stall on Avenue Mohammed V in Rabat, and reporting from 2019 described him as the oldest bookseller still working in the medina. Morocco World News said he worked 12-hour days and made one or two sales on an average day. (moroccoworldnews.com) The story resurfaced on April 22, 2026, after a social post highlighted Aziz’s life in books and his habit of leaving books outside in the street. News18 said the post spread widely and repeated the line often attributed to him: “Those who can’t read won’t steal books. And those who can, aren’t thieves.” (news18.com) The timing overlaps with World Book and Copyright Day on April 23 and with Rabat’s opening as UNESCO World Book Capital 2026. UNESCO announced Rabat’s designation in October 2024, with the program beginning on April 23, 2026. (unesco.org) Aziz’s biography has been told for years as a literacy story as much as a human-interest one. In a 2019 profile, he said he had read more than 4,000 books and called bookselling his “revenge” on childhood poverty and lost schooling. (moroccoworldnews.com) That same 2019 report placed his life against Morocco’s literacy record, citing state statistics that put illiteracy at 87% in 1960 and 32% in 2014. Aziz said he wanted others to have the same chance to “live” through books that he found outside formal education. (moroccoworldnews.com) Accounts of Aziz’s reading vary in the exact total, with some recent retellings saying 4,000 books and others saying 5,000, and News18 noted that the higher claims are hard to verify independently. The basic facts are steadier: he has spent more than six decades around books in the same part of Rabat, and people still stop to photograph him reading in his doorway. (news18.com)
